Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

In case you or anyone else in this solar system were under any misconception or illusion, Eddie Greenspan made it quite clear yesterday that he thinks David Radler is a liar. In the couple of hours that Radler was on the stand, Eddie made the dreaded accusation, by one scribe’s count, over a hundred times. By the time the Battling Bickersons of Room 1241 are done, it’ll be in the thousands. The press, of course, reported every variation on the theme. “Not entirely truthful means you’re lying,” “You must perform or lose your deal” and the ever popular sidecar “It is a game for you, isn’t it?” After perusing the avalanche, I was reminded of nothing so much as the famed Monty Python sketch The Argument Clinic:

-Oh look, this isn’t an argument.-Yes it is.-No it isn’t. It’s just contradiction.-No it isn’t.-Yes, it is!-It is not.-It is. You just contradicted me.-No, I didn’t.-Oh, you did!-No, no, no, no.-You did just then.-No, no, nonsense!-Oh, this is futile!-No it isn’t.

And just when you thought things couldn’t get any more absurd, there was Edward Genson asking the judge for a mistrial because, he argued, reading out Conrad Black’s orotund prose to the jury constituted an appeal to “class prejudice.” What a working class jury in Chicago made of that spectacularly patronizing remark one can only guess. Along similar lines, Richard Siklos made the day’s most arch and, I thought, telling observation when he reported that:

“Mr. Greenspan also tried to show Mr. Black’s accomplishments in business and world affairs. For instance, he noted that an article Mr. Black wrote as a young man in The Sherbrooke Record in Quebec was read into the Congressional Record in the United States. He noted that in the mid-1980s, Mr. Black’s contacts through the invitation-only Bilderberg Group led to his acquisition of The Daily Telegraph. It was unclear from their expressions whether the jury understood the reference to Bilderberg, an annual conference of influential people in business, media and politics.”